A one-act text of performative poetry
in twelve parts
for two voices
sung and spoken
English with some French
2017 / 2019 / ongoing
overview
It was impossible to have known then, but “Confetti Palace” was itching to happen back in 2017.
Hardly had I finished writing an English translation of Portrait des Meidosems (1949) by Henri Michaux, a narrative suite of French prose-poems about a troupe of mysterious creatures called the Meidosems and their passage towards an unknown destination, when I began embellishing it with asides and annotations. The more we fed each other the hungrier we got, until one day we wore each other out, consented to a hiatus, and cut each other off. I knew there was something there, but not what to do with it.
By 2019, the calling and tugging started up again. It was a strange and beautiful piece of writing, Michaux’s text, filled with realistic descriptions nailed to a magical and imaginary logic. The physical descriptions were frugal and periodic. The mental effect was continuous and haunting and, most of all, skewed by a colonial claustrophobia trapping the central motif of formless creatures surveilled during their journey of escape. Some are preordained to be free agents. They write their own stories and those of others. The rest must reconcile to be guided by an invisible force mediated by the free agents. Two years prior all this had given me a toothache. I had tried to distract the toothache with annotations to the translation. Now I wanted it to go away altogether.
It was some weeks before I started the erasure to make a new fiction. I decided to set down requirements for the new piece as rigid and simple as those of a limerick. My building blocks would be forms of poetry that were vocal, performable, and wanted to be heard. They would contain recital and song, even if their music was subtle like a breeze that does not fully know itself. They would elevate the simplest diction with ritual flow. These qualities became the skeleton to structure new ideas, writing, and characters as a fresh narrative led by dialogue. Select references of journey and renewal drawn from Francophone and Japanese literature, the Kena Upanishad, and the fragments of Gilgamesh fed the process along the way.
The theme – the joy and folly of welding and filling one’s own treasure chest of origins and instruments for the future – is compressed within a storyline that joins two simple things – love and escape. The dramaturgical principle is likewise small, intimate. Two performing voices assume the role of two main protagonists before the narrative aerates and a few more figures creep in. The number of performers remains exactly as before, just two: a singing voice and speaking voice. To now lap the story’s graduating lushness becomes their task across twelve scenes unfolding in poetic dialogue.
plot
Curtain rise finds us in the company of protagonists Sora and Jun, two separated lovers characterised by a familiar bind—unable to live with and without each other. They are on a bridge, holding hands. Rather than tear into each other or end things outright, they dive back into the exasperating tensions of their dissolved romance, this time through storytelling. They begin to mull on the legend of the Meidosems, a band of chameleon-like figures on a mission to flee their vulnerable place of residence, which could melt, dissolve, or get ravaged by pests—what is a city constructed from sugar.
Before long, the allegorical plot takes on a life of its own. The Meidosems, so far known to us only through Sora and Jun’s dialogue, refuse the cage of fable. Wriggling free of the narrative in which they have been asked to play the part of a filter, they strike out on their own. They leap to the cruel pleasure of creating their own adventures, outcome in the wind, leaving Sora and Jun now bereft of allegory forced to confront each other and their mistakes.
performance history
In ongoing collaboration with New York-based pianist-composer Richard Sears, the piece has been workshopped for a public audience at two venues.
Spectrum, Brooklyn, New York on 15th November, 2019 | Story, text, and spoken voice : Prajna Desai | Composition and piano : Richard Sears | Sung voice : Sarah Elizabeth Charles | Cello : Christopher Hampton | Drums : Michael Davis – drums / Total duration : 45 minutes
The Owl Music Parlor, Brooklyn, New York on 14th September, 2019 | Story, text, and spoken voice : Prajna Desai | Composition and piano : Richard Sears | Sung voice : Sarah Elizabeth Charles | Cello : Mariel Roberts | Percussion : Satoshi Takeishi / Total duration : 50 minutes
upcoming
The complete, expanded “Confetti Palace” incorporating a significant shift in theatrical perspective and scale is in the works to take shape as a full-fledged opera in two acts scored for two soloists, small ensemble, and chorus. A recently awarded performance commission from the American Composers Forum will partially support a short US run in 2021.
publication
Planned as a three part book including the complete annotated text of “Confetti Palace”, a French translation of “Confetti Palace”, and my French-to-English translation of Henri Michaux’s Portrait des Meidosems.
excerpt – from scene 12, confetti palace
JUN
Like all Meidosems like all Meidosems.
She dreams only
of entering the Confetti Palace.
All Meidosems like all Meidosems.
She dreams only
of entering the Confetti Palace.
SORA
Along the way they stop for tea.
A parade of green suns hold court.
Cups of green tea.
Their mouths chew on stars
pressed from sugar they stole
from the city they fled.
Behind, the city crumbles.
A burp resolves everything.
As soon as they’re nourished
they slip up the walls
to the roof, there’s
always space for a Meidosem.
On any promontory there’s always
a Meidosem. They can’t rest
on earth there’s no pleasure.
As soon as they’re nourished
they depart into the air.
JUN
Tremblings, cyclonic passions,
these the risks of air
are the joys of air.
How not to be swept away
by the flurry of heights.
How not to crash.
Constant skyfalls of Meidosemms.
The stranger grows indifferent.
One has to be of them to care.
Sora, look at their eyes upon the air
only to watch their relatives fall.
SORA
Wings without heads, without birds,
the body all wing
glides to the sunlight.
Sky.
Reproducing this work in part or whole requires permission from Prajna Desai